This thesis employs interpretive research via ethnographic fieldwork to explore the complex relationship between the postmodern self and consumption symbolism. In postmodernity, where society becomes more global but simultaneously decentred, pastiche-like and hyperreal, the self is encountering a number of dilemmas propelled by the looming threat of personal meaninglessness. In order to attain a sense of existence, the self appears to seek the meaningfulness of life from and through symbolic consumption. Indeed, postmodernity is primarily a consumer culture where consumption is central to the meaningful practice of our everyday life. The postmodern self makes consumption choices not only from the products' utilities but also from their symbolic meanings, the function of which operates in two directions: outward in constructing the social world, social-symbolism; and inward in constructing our self-identity, self-symbolism. To understand these phenomena, ethnographic fieldwork of four distinctive groups - a group of male femaling transgenders, a group of young nouveaux riches, a group of young extremist Buddhists and a group of young provincial women - are conducted in Bangkok, Thailand. Principally, the research explores how the informants employ everyday consumption symbolically in their self-creation processes. It also examines how the informants appropriate symbolic meanings through and from their lived and mediated experiences, and incorporate these meanings into their symbolic self-projects by means of everyday consumption. Moreover, it observes how the informants negotiate their self-social symbolism through the process of self-others identification within their friendship groups. The interpretations unfold a number of surprising outcomes which provide insight into the informants' self-projects and their consumption experiences. To conceptualise the interpretations, a model - Consumption Symbolism and the Harmonising Self - is proposed.

This study considers the problem of the consumer in light of work presented by classical economists who discussed consumption. Richer assumptions about the tasks of an individual consumer and technology of consumption activities are used to develop a static model of consumer behavior. This model is extended through the introduction of opponent-process theory to develop a dynamic model which includes habit formation. Particular emphasis is placed in Chapter 2 upon the psychological underpinnings of consumption activities and the allocation of time aspect of these activities. It is assumed that a consumption activity is defined as a production function combining commodity and time inputs to produce satisfaction. Chapter 3 presents the framework over which preferences about different activities are defined. Preference relationships are assumed to be rational, transitive, and constant over time and location. In addition, satiation in a particular consumption activity is assumed to exist and the ranking over satiation states is defined. Chapter 4 deals with the behavior of a time and income constrained consumer who seeks to choose an optimal bundle of commodity and time inputs over the ordered activity set. The solution to this problem is characterized by affordable allocation of resources from the highest ranked down to the lowest ranked activity. Comparative statics results associated with this solution are considered for non-labor income, wage rate, and price changes. It is shown that besides the production substitution effects brought about by changes in the wage rate and in commodity prices, the net effect of changes in economic variables is predominantly at the lower end of the preference ordering. Chapter 5 presents both a psychological version of opponent-process theory and an economic interpretation of this theory which is used to describe habit dynamics. Chapter 6 combines the static consumer problem and the dynamic description of activity productions under habit formation to present an extended problem of a dynamic consumer behavior.

This dissertation examines how agents process information and update their beliefs in two different contexts. In the first two chapters we consider dynamic decision problems under perfect information. In the last chapter we consider static, strategic interactions with common knowledge but imperfect information. To tackle our first set of questions we design an experiment analogous to the dynamic consumption problem with stochastic income that households solve in standard macroeconomic models. In the first chapter we show that our subjects condition on past actions in the absence of informational frictions or switching costs. We argue that subjects do so to economize on scarce cognitive resources and develop a model of inattentive reconsideration that fits our data. An implication of our model is that inertia is state- dependent. In the second chapter we revisit the longstanding problem in empirical macroeconomics of excess sensitivity of consumption to income in our experimental data. We find that excess sensitivity arises from two distinct channels. The first channel is an overreaction of households to the arrival of income that is independent of their wealth level. The second is increased excess smoothness with respect to wealth when households receive news about future income. The third chapter examines the scope for persuasion in global games. We consider a central bank with a commitment technology that chooses a robustly optimal persuasion strategy. We show that such a policy can reduce and even eliminate multiple equilibria in such games because it updates agents beliefs so that coordination motives become irrelevant. This suggests that central bankers are better served from influencing the markets through announcements rather than direct intervention.

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 213-214. / Ph.D.

Chapter one of this thesis examines how tying social insurance to marriage influences matching and marital decisions in the context of Sweden, and draws implications for when it is optimal to separate social insurance from marriage in modern societies. Chapter two analyzes firms' communication strategies in a market where consumers face attention constraints, and discusses regulation that can protect consumers from exploitation. Chapter three studies communication and coercion in the presence of an altruistic relationship, and offers a benevolent rationale for constraining liberty to protect individuals from self-harm, for example through safety mandates.

“Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society in Argentina, 1898-1946” is a study of Argentine mass culture in a new consumer society: a new cultural dynamic that emerged around the turn of the century in Buenos Aires. This dynamic entailed a redefinition not only of the relationships between culture, creators, and publics, but also of those categories themselves. Early twentieth-century Argentine mass culture was a heterogeneous realm of cultural production and consumption in which varied and often conflicting ideologies, aesthetic convictions, and class or party allegiances jostled for purchase, creating a constant push and pull of competing desires and values. Within this context, criticism and ambivalence about the effects of cultural modernization was ubiquitous, a byproduct not only of the heterogeneity within mass culture itself, but also of the tension-filled incorporation of culture into the market. By analyzing Argentine mass culture in this light, my dissertation challenges monolithic understandings of mass culture that ignore how it exposed and grappled with the tensions in its own premises. The cultural dynamic of the period collapsed the categories of culture, consumer good, and entertainment and blurred the limits between production and consumption, often provoking dismay from creators, cultural critics, nationalists, and educators, frequently voiced from within mass culture itself. Mass culture adopted variety as a central premise, claiming to offer something for everyone and for every taste, in a business strategy designed to attract as many paying consumers as possible, and to turn them into brand loyalists. Cultural ventures also used a number of other tools, such as novelty, brevity, immediacy, familiarity, levity, and affordability, to expand their market share through entertainment, providing cultural production that fit the bill and encouraging Argentines to demand these qualities of the cultural production they consumed. Mass culture also encouraged Argentines to view the world through the logic of spectacle, according to which anything or anyone, given the mass cultural treatment, could be transformed into entertainment. While the transformation of culture into a for-profit entertainment venture and a consumer good made it possible for more aspiring artists to make a living at writing or performing, it also provoked frequent criticisms of the industrialization of culture, the mercantilism of producers, the quality of cultural works, and the naïveté of audiences and aspiring creators. To better understand the tensions in play in this new cultural dynamic, I advance the concept of “cultured consumption,” a term I use to identify the dominant ideal of consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. As a loose complex of practices, cultured consumption was characterized by a tension between competing models of social aspiration: one, based on the performance of gentility and refinement, per aristocratic practices; another, founded upon a middle-class ideal of comfortable domesticity and family-centered values. Thus, by participating in cultured consumption, Argentines asserted their ascription to a certain set of potentially competing values and desires, from upward mobility and good taste to economy and family unity. Furthermore, according to the premises of cultured consumption, purchase of certain products and participation in certain activities would mark consumers as authentically and patriotically Argentine. Nevertheless, it was not clear how Argentine culture was to reconcile refinement and moderation, performance and authenticity, and public and private activity. Cultured consumption was, thus, both progressive and conservative, aspirational and protective of the status quo; in it, standards of taste took on moral and even political connotations. Through it, culture was both democratized and limited according to a set of sometimes competing standards and values. In this way, mass culture promised ever broader sectors of the population that by participating fully in it they could satisfy their heterogeneous desires, experience self-actualization, and improve their lot in life. At the same time, mass culture invoked consumption, spectatorship, and artistic aspirations as possible threats to the stability of the family and social structure to limit the expansion of access to culture and cultural production. Mass culture, thus, set itself up as the articulating joint between public and private life in Buenos Aires: a series of practices that increasingly defined participation in, and an interpretative lens that allowed Argentines to make sense of, public and private life—including mass culture and consumption themselves. Against the limited narratives of the period traditionally proposed by literary criticism and cultural history, this dissertation argues that it is precisely this heterogeneous area of mass cultural production that can help us better understand Argentine culture of the period more broadly: it allows us to see how these tensions played out on a massive scale. Considering cross-object study to be essential for understanding the new cultural dynamic, this dissertation recuperates archival materials and understudied genres such as mass-circulation periodicals, advertisements, reviews, advice literature, recitation manuals, celebrity profiles, and popular plays and music, and analyzes both the texts themselves and the interactions, institutions, and practices around them. This methodology allows me to do two things: first, to put disciplines such as consumer history and media studies in dialogue with literary criticism, theater history, and cultural studies; second, to complicate the narratives of the period traditionally espoused by literary critics and cultural historians. While the former, through their focus on aesthetic and political polemics, largely erased an area of cultural production massively consumed in the early twentieth century, the latter, by portraying culture as tangential to a more important political or economic narrative, deny culture its historical agency. My dissertation, in contrast, considers Argentine mass culture of the period to be not only a cultural dynamic that comprised systems of production, practices, and content, but, more broadly, the mouthpiece of a new worldview that redefined all areas of life. This worldview, originating in the cultural realm, would shape the course of Argentine social, economic, and political history to come. In foregrounding mass culture in this way, I propose a new corpus and lens for evaluating modernization in Buenos Aires.

This dissertation presents an ethnography of market dynamics in India, following state-directed economic liberalization during early 1990's. The decade of the 90's convulsed Indian society deeply through an aggressive and top-down economic reform program, while at the same time, militant Hinduism and lower caste movements sought violently to capture and dominate social space. Engaging this social context my dissertation looks at the market forces, which hitherto were a subordinate partner to the paternalist Indian state in the cultural production of meaning and identities, take the center-stage and move out of the shadows of a tactically receding Indian state, and strive to re-establish hegemony in a highly contested, fraught and charged politico-cultural field. The dissertation then analyzes the corporatist understanding and viewpoints of contemporary India's economic standing and prospects, highlighting their own projects and ambitions that appear uniquely tied to their self-imagination of the role they are poised to play in the emerging shape of economy and society in India. In the process, I show that the concepts, frameworks and classificatory schemas used by corporate houses to understand, capture and represent the Indian social, which first and foremost involved constitution of an immense ethnographically based epistemological cartography of Indian society, are neither neutral, nor transparent, but rather, inflected and laden with a desire to conquer a social field that is already ideologically rife with neo-liberalism and Hindu fundamentalist motifs. I suggest that the aforementioned strategies of publicity and advertising - and the advertising industry is the focus of this dissertation- are not averse to symbolically borrowing and encoding neo-liberal and religious faith as everyday commonsense. By extension I show how the production of their vision of the `new India' quite undermines the Nehruvian vision of secularism and its juridical schemas of inter-religious tolerance and co-existence, of socialism and its ethic of labor and production, displacing it with a late-capitalist, neo-liberal, middle class conceptions of consumption and enjoyment.

Zhou Yu. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 52-57). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter I. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- Dynamics of A One-sector Growth Model with Consumption and Capital Externalities --- p.4 / Chapter III. --- Consumption Externalities and Individual Consumption --- p.26 / Chapter IV. --- Capital Externalities and Long-run Productions --- p.36 / Chapter V. --- Conclusion --- p.50 / Chapter VI. --- References --- p.52 / Chapter VII. --- Appendix --- p.58

Chan Chung Yan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iv / Table of Contents --- p.v / List of Figures --- p.vi / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- An Illustration with a Small Open Economy Model / Chapter 2.1 --- Review of Obstfeld (1990) --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- A Model with Socially-Determined Time Preference --- p.6 / Chapter 3. --- Small Open Economy Models with Socially-Determined Time Preference --- p.15 / Chapter 3.1 --- The Laursen-Metzler Effect --- p.16 / Chapter 3.2 --- Exchange-Rate Dynamics --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3 --- Capital Mobility and Devaluation --- p.28 / Chapter 4. --- Dynamics of a Small Open Economy Model with Non-Flat Bond Curves --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1 --- Downward-Sloping Bond Curve --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2 --- Upward-Sloping Bond Curve --- p.38 / Chapter 5. --- Investment and Saving in a Small Open Economy Model with Capital Accumulation / Chapter 5.1 --- The Model --- p.41 / Chapter 5.2 --- Productivity Shocks --- p.46 / Chapter 6. --- Saddle-Path Stability of a Closed Economy Growth Model --- p.49 / Chapter 7. --- Conclusion --- p.54 / References --- p.57 / Appendix --- p.60

Lundberg et al. (2003)主張的婚姻談判理論指出退休家庭消費驟降現象是由於夫妻間的相對談判能力在丈夫退休後出現變化而造成。而且該下跌的幅度取決於二人年齡的差異。本論文考慮到 Aguiar and Hurst (2005)的評論消費應該被視為支出和時間的輸出，嘗試修改 Lundberg et al. (2003)的婚姻談判模型，並從食物攝取量的角度重新探討它在退休消費決策中所扮演的角色。我利用美國全國食品調查的食品消費支出和攝取量數據，結果發現儘管退休已婚夫婦的消費支出有下降跡象，但無論是已婚還是單身家庭均沒有減少消費的數量或降低消費的品質。此外，我發現並無任何證據顯示在已婚家庭組別中，夫婦間年齡差距較大的家庭會傾向於丈夫退休後削減更多消費或支出。這些結果與理論預期不符合。因此，認為婚姻談判理論能充分解釋已婚家庭退休消費行為的推斷還是言之過早。 / The Marital Bargaining Theory proposed by Lundberg et al. (2003) suggests that a discontinuity in consumption expenditure at retirement is attributable to the change in the relative bargaining power of husbands and wives upon the husband's retirement, and that the extent of such a decline depends upon age differences in couples. This thesis responds to Aguiar and Hurst (2005)'s critique that consumption should be regarded as an outcome of market expenses and time. With this taken into consideration, I attempt to rewrite the marital bargaining model and reexamine its role in the retirement-consumption decision empirically from the perspective of food intake. By exploiting data on food expenditures and intake from U.S nationwide food surveys, I show that despite a drop in expenditures for married couples, neither married nor single households experience a decline in consumption associated with retirement in terms of food quantity and quality. Also, I find no evidence that married couples with big age gaps suffer from a larger decline in either expenditures or consumption relative to those who are closer in age. These results are inconsistent with a modified model of marital bargaining. It is thus premature to conclude that the Marital Bargaining Theory plays an important role in explaining the retirement-consumption behavior of married couples. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Wong, Lok Sze. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-83). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / 摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- Literature Review --- p.4 / Chapter 3. --- Data --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Survey Description --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- Sample Selection --- p.18 / Chapter 3.3 --- Summary Statistics --- p.20 / Chapter 4. --- Change in Expenditure and Time use at Retirement --- p.21 / Chapter 5. --- Modified Model of Marital Bargaining --- p.26 / Chapter 6. --- Methodology for Consumption Analysis --- p.32 / Chapter 7. --- Comparison of the CSFII and NHANES Estimates --- p.37 / Chapter 8. --- Retirement-Consumption Behaviors across Married Couples --- p.40 / Chapter 9. --- Discussion and Implication --- p.47 / Chapter 10. --- Conclusion --- p.50 / Chapter Figure 1: --- Retirement Rates by Age in the CSFII --- p.52 / Chapter Table 1: --- Demographic Statistics of Male Household Heads Aged Between 57 and 71 in the CSFII and NHANES by Marital Status --- p.53 / Chapter Table 2: --- Descriptive Statistics of Self-Reported Health Status and Specific Health Conditions of Male Household Heads Aged Between 57 and 71 in the CSFII and NHANES by Marital Status --- p.54 / Chapter Table 3: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Log Food Expenditure and Shopping Frequency Upon Retirement by Marital Status --- p.55 / Chapter Table 4: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Log Food Expenditure and Shopping Frequency Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age --- p.56 / Chapter Table 5: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Log Food Expenditure and Shopping Frequency Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Three Groups) --- p.57 / Chapter Table 6: --- Comparison of Predictions Between Standard and Modified Marital Bargaining Models --- p.58 / Chapter Table 7: --- Comparison of Regression Results for Average Population Between the CSFII and NHANES (Nutritional Compositions) --- p.59 / Chapter Table 8: --- Comparison of Regression Results for Average Population Between the CSFII and NHANES (Propensity to Consume Food Categories) --- p.60 / Chapter Table 9: --- Comparison of Regression Results for Average Population Between the CSFII and NHANES (Propensity to Eat Away from Home) --- p.61 / Chapter Table 10: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Nutritional Compositions Upon Retirement by Marital Status --- p.62 / Chapter Table 11: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Consume Food Categories Upon Retirement by Marital Status --- p.63 / Chapter Table 12: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Eat Away from Home Upon Retirement by Marital Status --- p.64 / Chapter Table 13: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Nutritional Compositions Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Three Groups) --- p.65 / Chapter Table 14: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Consume Food Categories Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Three Groups) --- p.66 / Chapter Table 15: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Eat Away from Home Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Three Groups) --- p.67 / Chapter Table 16: --- Comparison of Empirical Results and Predictions of Two Models, With and Without Change in Bargaining Power Within Marriage, for Married Couple Households --- p.68 / Chapter Appendix Table 1: --- The Median Annual Household Incomes in the 1999-2008 CPS March Supplement and the Corresponding Income Ranges in the NHANES --- p.69 / Chapter Appendix Table 2: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Nutritional Compositions Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Non-Household Head) --- p.70 / Chapter Appendix Table 3: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Consume Food Categories Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Non-Household Head) --- p.71 / Chapter Appendix Table 4: --- Instrumental Variable Regression of Changes in Propensity to Eat Away from Home Upon Retirement for Married Couples by Difference in Age (Non-Household Head) --- p.72 / Chapter Appendix: --- Proof 1 --- p.73 / Chapter Appendix: --- Proof 2 --- p.76 / References --- p.81